Back Story

by Robert B. Parker

  “I hate it when people bullshit me.”

  “I never bullshitted you, man.”

  “Why does Evelina Karnofsky send you money every month?” I said.

  “I don’t know who that is, man. Honest to God.”

  I slapped him with my open right hand across the face. It was hard enough to make him stagger two steps sideways. He put his forearms up on either side of his face.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “This can get a lot worse, Barry. Tell me about Evelina Karnofsky.”

  “I can’t, man. I don’t know nothing. . . .”

  I hit him again. His forearms were still protecting his face, but the blow rocked him sideways again and scared him more than it hurt him. He doubled up with his hands clasped over his head.

  “Evelina?” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. It was hard to slap him, doubled up like he was, so I punched him lightly in the left kidney. He fell. I hadn’t hit him hard enough to knock him down. He was on the floor now, his arms around his head, his knees up, trying to curl into a ball.

  “Evelina?” I said.

  He stayed where he was. I gave him a friendly kick in the side.

  “Evelina?”

  “Stop it. Don’t kick me. I’ll tell you. Stop it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I reached down and helped him up. Upright, he stayed bent over as if he’d been shot in the stomach. Lucky, I hadn’t hit him hard. He’d have probably died.

  “I need to sit down,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Gimme a minute, man, lemme get myself together.”

  “Take your time,” I said.

  When necessary, one could play good cop/bad cop alone.

  He sat and started to make himself a joint. His hands were shaking. The left side of his face was red where I’d slapped him. He got the joint assembled. And lit. And he took a deep, long drag on it and held it in as long as he could before he exhaled slowly. He studied the burning end of the joint for a moment. Then he leaned forward a little and put his elbows on his knees and looked straight at me.

  “Daryl ain’t really my daughter,” he said.

  “She know that?” I said. “No.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I don’t know all about it,” Barry said. “Just the part I know about, you know?”

  “Tell me that part,” I said.

  He took another long drag on the reefer. “Me and Emily was living in a house downtown,” Barry said, “with Bunny and a couple black dudes, a guy named Abner, and a guy named Leon.”

  He smoked some more.

  “And Abner and Bunny kind of paired off. And me and Emily got together. And Leon was mostly bringing home, you know, the harlot of the night.”

  The joint was gone. He made another one, calmer now, his hands steady as he talked. I waited. He spent awhile getting the joint together and getting it lit.

  “So who had the, ah, fling with Emily?” I said.

  “Emily had a lotta flings,” Barry said. He was easy now, gliding on marijuana. “But that ain’t what went down.”

  I nodded. Patient, but stern.

  “Emily ain’t Daryl’s mom, neither.”

  Jesus Christ.

  Barry knew it was headline news. He waited a moment to let the effect sink in, enjoying it. Feeling important. Feeling happy now, on his second joint.

  “Tell me about that,” I said.

  “Abner and Bunny were going really hot and heavy,” Barry said. “Her especially. She was like a bitch in heat around him.”

  He paused for a moment and smiled to himself, I think, remembering. I waited. He remembered.

  Finally I nudged him. “Uh-huh.”

  He smoked some more and then came back to me. His smile was beginning to look a little loopy.

  “And,” he said, “anyway, he knocked her up.”

  “What was Abner’s last name?” I said.

  “I don’t remember. It was a funny name.”

  “Dandy?” I said.

  “No, man. But like that.”

  “Fancy?”

  “Yeah. That’s it. Abner Fancy. What a hot-shit name.”

  “And Bunny?”

  “Like I tole you last time. When I knew her then, she was calling herself Bunny Lombard.”

  “But that wasn’t her real name.”

  “No.”

  “Her real name was?”

  “Karnofsky,” Barry said. “Bunny Karnofsky. No wonder she changed it.”

  “Daryl is Bunny’s daughter?”

  “Her and Abner’s,” Barry said.

  “So how did she end up with you?”

  Barry grinned. A big grin, a high and happy grin. Forget about being slapped around. All is forgiven. He took a drag on his cigarette.

  “Jesus,” he said, his voice odd and strained as he let the smoke out through it slowly. “Where are my fuckin’ manners? You wanna toke, man?”

  “Thanks, no,” I said. “How did Daryl end up with you?”

  “Bunny gave her to us.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yeah. Baby was fair-skinned and, you know, Emily was dark anyway. No one was going to notice.”

  I walked to the door and looked out at the black Lab sleeping in the sun, on his side, his eyes shut, his tongue lolling out. I turned and looked at Barry.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Emily kind of liked babies,” Barry said. “And, like, Bunny said she’d give us support money.”

  “Or her mother would,” I said. “I was more wondering why she gave her to you than why you took her.”

  “She didn’t want her.”

  “Any reason?”

  “I don’t know,” Barry said. “Maybe she didn’t want a shvartzeh kid. I think she just didn’t want the bother. At least she didn’t leave it in a Dumpster.”

  “Good for her,” I said. “You adopt her?”

  “Not really,” Barry said. “But I got her birth certificate. In case anything ever came up.”

  “May I see it?”

  “It’s in a safe place.”

  “Safe from whom?” I said.

  “Whoever,” Barry said. His loopy smile had a crafty little edge to it.

  “That’s why the support payments keep coming,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Even though she’s thirty-four and gone,” I said.

  He shrugged again. The reefer had burned down to the most meager of roaches. He could barely hold it. Carefully, he took a last long drag on it, trying not to burn his lips.

  “That’s how you live,” I said. “That’s how you got this house. All that crap about her grandparents’ insurance. You’ve been blackmailing Bunny for years.”

  “Two thousand a month ain’t much,” he said.

  He snubbed the remnant of his reefer out in his ashtray and began to fumble with the makings for a new one.

  “So she was yours for, what, six years, and then Emily took up with Leon, and then she got killed and . . .”

  “The cops shipped her back to me, everybody thought I was her father,” Barry said. “What the fuck, man, Leon wasn’t going to keep her.”

  “You didn’t need her for the blackmail scam,” I said. “You had the birth certificate.”

  Barry shrugged. “She’d been with me for six years,” he said.

  I stared at him. The counterculture had always seemed Saran-Wrap thin to me. Passionate about abstraction, flaccid about human feelings. Barry was inarguably an aimless creep. But there it was. He’d taken Daryl and made some vague and nearly useless attempt at fathering her. I shook my head.

  “What?” Barry said vaguely.

  “Where does Leon fit in all this?”

  “I don’t know. He was fucking Emily for awhile, then she went away with him. Then she got killed. I don’t know much about him after she got killed.”

  “He involved in that bank holdup?” I said.

&
nbsp; “I dunno.”

  “He know about Daryl?”

  “What about her?”

  “Did he know she was Bunny’s daughter.”

  “Naw. Me and Emily and Bunny was the only ones who knew.”

  “Abner didn’t know?”

  “Oh, him, yeah, I suppose.”

  “You know what happened to him?”

  “Naw.”

  He had smoked himself past good feeling and was starting down the hill to depression.

  “You know who Bunny’s father is?” I said.

  He started to cry.

  “Naw, man. Shit, I don’t know nothing. I never knew nothing. I never been nothing.”

  “Well, I guess you were Daryl’s father,” I said. “Sort of.”

  53

  I was having breakfast with Captain Samuelson at Nate and Al’s deli in Beverly Hills, just two booths away from Larry King. In the booth with us was a thin-faced, sandy-haired FBI agent named Dennis Clark. Samuelson said he had no reason to bring Leon downtown, and that Leon was known to be heavily lawyered, and in the current climate, Samuelson didn’t want a black man’s lawyer screaming publicly about police harassment.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “it would seem no more than courteous for us to go with you when you stop by for a chat.”

  “Reduces the chance that he’ll shoot me, too,” I said. “I suppose it does,” Samuelson said.

  I had ordered scrambled eggs with onions. Samuelson had shredded wheat. Clark was drinking black coffee.

  “I’m here because Epstein called me,” Clark said. “We went through the academy together. He’s a good agent and a good guy.”

  “We appreciate it,” I said.

  “Just remember, my presence is completely unofficial.”

  I nodded. Samuelson ate some of his cereal.

  “We just need you to be there, Dennis,” Samuelson said. “You don’t have to say a word.”

  “Just so you know,” Clark said.

  “We know,” Samuelson said.

  “And if I swear I wasn’t present, you both back me.”

  “We do,” I said.

  Clark looked at Samuelson.

  “Of course, Dennis,” Samuelson said. “Absolutely.”

  Clark nodded and drank his coffee. Samuelson sprinkled some Equal on his cereal and ate a spoonful.

  “Why’d you decide to talk with him again?” Samuelson said to me. “You learned bubkes last time.”

  “I got the tacit admission that he knew Emily Gordon,” I said.

  “The broad that got killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew that anyway.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “You learn anything else?”

  “No.”

  “So why do you think you’ll do better this time?”

  “Ever hopeful,” I said.

  “Ever a pain in the ass,” Samuelson said.

  “I value consistency,” I said.

  “Okay,” Samuelson said. “We’ll drive up and see him.”

  An L.A. police captain and an FBI agent got more respect at Leon’s house than Hawk and I had gotten. We were ushered in without even a patdown by the same greeting team that Hawk and I had met. We went into the same ridiculous room, where Leon was waiting for us in the same chair. Today he was wearing a black-and-gold dashiki. He gave us the same preprogrammed stare.

  Samuelson introduced himself and said, “I believe you’ve met Spenser.”

  Leon made one small nod to indicate that he had. It also indicated somehow that he hadn’t been impressed.

  “And this other gentleman,” Samuelson said, “is Special Agent Dennis Clark of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  Samuelson gave “Federal Bureau of Investigation” a nice dramatic overtone.

  “Spenser and I are working in cooperation with the Bureau,” Samuelson said solemnly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Old case,” Samuelson said. “1974.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And, well, let’s not beat around the bush,” Samuelson said. “We know you’re involved.”

  “Involved in what?” Leon said.

  “The FBI has informed us that you were involved in a bank holdup in Boston in 1974 in which a young woman you were with was killed.”

  “Boston?”

  “Uh-huh. The woman was Emily Gold, and we know she was your girlfriend. We’re not sure you killed her,” Samuelson said, “but the Bureau thinks you did, and they’ve asked us to talk with you.”

  “The Bureau thinks I killed some broad in Boston?” Leon said.

  He was staring at Clark.

  “Yep.”

  “Show me something, says you’re FBI,” Leon said.

  Clark showed him a badge. Leon studied it. “You the one thinks I killed somebody in Boston?” he said to Clark.

  Clark shook his head.

  “So,” Leon said to Samuelson, “who the fuck you talking to thinks I killed some broad.”

  “From the Boston office,” Samuelson said. “Special Agent Malone.”

  “Malone?”

  “Yeah. Evan Malone.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Cops don’t lie, Leon,” Samuelson said. “You know that.”

  “He knows I didn’t kill her.”

  “We can prove you knew her,” I said.

  “Malone knows I didn’t do it, the lying motherfucker.”

  “How’s he know that?” Samuelson said.

  “I wasn’t even in the fucking bank, man.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was just the driver, man. Malone knows that.”

  “How,” Samuelson said.

  “Man, I told him. He knows I didn’t shoot that broad.”

  We were quiet for a moment. We had been right. It was as if we all knew it at the same time. The other two let me say it.

  “You were the mole,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You were the undercover guy. The informant. You were working for the Feds and Malone was your handler.”

  “Yeah.”

  Leon seemed calm about it. He still assumed the Bureau would take care of him.

  “And when the bank job went down, they didn’t want you compromised.”

  “Right.”

  I nodded.

  “So who killed Emily Gold?” Samuelson said.

  “I don’t know, man. I tole you. I was in the car. They come busting out of the bank and said Emily got shot and to roll it.”

  “Who was in the bank?” I said.

  “Shaka, Bunny, white hippie asshole I don’t even remember his name, and Emily.”

  “Shaka was Abner Fancy?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Emily go in with them?”

  “No, I tole all this to Malone, for crissake. Emily was the scout. She go in ahead of time, case the place, and if she don’t come out in three minutes, we go in. They go in. I just the driver.”

  “And no one ever said who shot her?”

  “No, man. I figure it’s some fucking cowboy bank guard, until I read the papers and they say it ain’t known who shot her, and then Malone get me and ships me out of town.”

  Clark forgot his vow of silence.

  “And set you up here?” Clark said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Clark’s face showed nothing.

  “Where’s Shaka?” Samuelson said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How about the white hippie asshole?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “How.”

  “I heard Shaka shot him.”

  “Because?”

  “Because he a fucking cokehead and he having a fucking miscarriage about the shooting in the bank.”

  “And Shaka thought he’d rat?”

  “No harm being sure,” Leon said.

  “Except maybe to the white hippie asshole.”

  “How about Bunny?”

  “Shit, man, I ain’t seen
Bunny since it went down.”

  “Weren’t you her main squeeze?”

  Leon shrugged.

  “For awhile,” he said. “She used to be Shaka’s when he still Abner Fancy. Then he dump her for Emily, which leaves her on the loose. So Bunny’s a pretty hot little bitch, and I scoop her for awhile. But I dumped her before the bank thing. I think she was having eyes for Abner again.”

  “Who was now Shaka,” I said.

  “Yeah. We was all big for names back then,” Leon said.

  “You know Emily had a husband?”

  Leon smiled a very thin smile.

  “I heard that.”

  “And a kid.”

  “Yeah. Daryl. I remember the kid. Emmy brought her when she took off with me.”

  We were quiet.

  “What are you guys fucking around with this thing for now?” Leon said.

  “Maybe so we can put you in the jug, Leon,” Samuelson said. “And hammer in the cork.”

  “Me. You fucking can’t touch me. I got a deal with the fucking federal government. Ask him, the FBI fuck.” Leon pointed at Clark. “He’ll tell you.”

  “You got no deal with me, Leon,” Clark said.

  “Fuck you. Ask Malone. You people can’t touch me. We got a deal.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Okay. Arrest me or get the fuck out,” Leon said. “I ain’t talking no more without my lawyer.”

  Samuelson stood.

  “We’ll get back to you,” he said.

  And the three of us left.

  On the ride back down the hill, with Samuelson driving, Clark said, “You know they weren’t just worried about keeping Leon in place.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “They didn’t want it known that one of their paid informants was the wheel man for a bank job,” Clark said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’ll talk with Epstein, see if we got a chance. Maybe we can open this thing up and let a little air in.”

  “Maybe we can bust Leon, too,” Samuelson said.

  “I’ll talk with Epstein about that, too,” Clark said. “You know what it’s like fighting the system you’re in.”

  “I do,” Samuelson said.

  “It’s why I’m not in one,” I said.

  “Really?” Samuelson said. “I talked about you with some people in Boston. They said you got canned for being an obstreperous hard-on.”

  “That’s the other reason,” I said.

  54

  I was home. More or less. It was evening, and I was in Quirk’s office with Epstein and Quirk, entertaining them with tales of California.